So China makes a stamped sheet metal semi-auto with a short stroke piston and a rotating bolt. It's not an AK variant but it could be considered a "close enough" distant relative twice removed to an AK variant.

Tried four different kinds of ammo (LCW, MFS, S&B, Hornady) and it ran like a clock hot or cold even if my skills did not.

The only functional issue I saw was that the last shot hold-open didn't reliably get tripped by the follower. Personally, I'm thinking of simply removing it. Seeing how a Valmet AK is legal here but very expensive, I don't think I like the AK-style stuff enough to shell out the whatever-thousand-bucks for a real one so making a T81 a little more like an AK in function might just have to do.

For some reason, the recoil on the T81 is remarkably light. I seem to recall both my SKSs and my buddy's SKS having more thump and wiggle than this. The trigger is about the same, the sights are about the same, both are pretty crude, although the drum adjustment on the rear sight isn't too bad.

Same thing in even higher framerate potatovision (480 frames per second).

Note that in this webm and in the previous slow-motion webm I am not shouldering the rifle to keep my winter coat hood out of the camera's view. Short stocks don't make it that easy to take this kind of angle; as a result the rifle moves around a bit more than it normally would when shouldered.

Moved to 100 yards and broke out the S&B with soft points. Unlike with the SKSs, I wasn't worried about slam-fires with this brass cased super soft primer stuff as the firing pin on the T81 is much lighter than the firing pin on the SKS.

In conclusion for this particular outing, while pricey for the bottom line, I feel like this thing might just take my SKSs' spots. I'll be doing more shooting and filming next week with corrosive surplus (and a lot of it) to really see how it do with cheap ammo. Basically, if it keeps hitting paper with cheap ammo, looking cool, and chugging along I will have no regrets.

>>106381Indeed they do. The store selling them, Tactical Imports in Canada, is apparently still trying to get them out shipped. The whole affair was a dumpster fire from the get-go but that's pretty much par for the course up here.

>>106392Not sure about the optic situation, I don't really see any way to easily attach anything. There's no rails and the rear sight base has to be left alone for disassembly of the gas piston stuff. It wasn't a factor in my purchase because I had a hankering for the very base bone stock piston-sheetmetal-7.62x39-bananamags and such. I personally haven't really seen discussion of possible optic mounting solutions either.

>safety
Oh the safety kinda caught me off-guard actually. It's pretty dumb. It's actually impressive how they could actually fuck up a safety that hard. I would much rather have to get off the trigger to flip down the AK safety than to perform the Chinese Thumbdance of Safetyning. Your thumb rests on the safety when it's on "fire" for some reason, and you then have to flip the safety 180 degrees to be on "safe". So when you want to shoot, the safety is a mile away and requires all sorts of pushing and tugging just to be changed to "fire".

The safety is just a rod with a cutout to block or allow movement of the trigger sear, so I'm very tempted to make a new one that would mimic an AK safety at least in how it is manipulated.

Anyone have any experience with other Chinese knock-offs like their NORINCO Type 79 (NDM-86) and Type 85 7.62x54R SVD sniper rifle copies? I have seen these T79s in 7.62x51mm NATO as well. Soviet Dragunovs are wildly expensive, but the Chinese could flood the market with cheap copies (if they are not banned from doing so).

A Chinese Norinco-made copy of the SVD, known as the Type 79. Equipped with a 4× magnification optical sight which is a copy of the PSO-1. The rifle has a slightly shorter butt. Also produced a modified Type 85 and several other commercial copies of the SVD. An upgraded variant called the CS/LR19 was also debuted. Export variants such as the "NSG-85" were also produced. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragunov_sniper_rifle

This reminds me of the best parts of an SKS mixed with an AK, with a touch of Vz.58 thrown in. Of course, they're SKS derived, so that makes sense. I guess the Vz.58 resemblance is a case of parallel development.

Pity they're not available in the US. I'd love to see a big commie rifle comparison between this, an AK, an SKS, and a Vz.

>>106400They're a grand in rainbow syrup strips, a little much but again up here it's the norm.

To be honest I notice more resemblances to the AK than anything else. This weekend I'll take pics next to an SKS to show the few similarities. Having owned VZs, I can also attest to the lack of resemblances between the T81 and the VZs.

I'll ask around to see if anyone up here might know a guy with a Valmet or a guy with his prohib for an AK. I know a dude at Marstar, they have AKs there, vid related.

> It's not an AK variant but it could be considered a "close enough" distant relative twice removed to an AK variant.
Forgive my idiocy, what makes it not an AK exactly? Is there something that is mechanically different? Other than metal quality it seems the same to me.

Holding off on comparison picture as I'm negotiating stuff with a possible entity who could provide a legal AK variant (or more than one) for a side-by-side. More later, might be a few days/weeks, hard to tell.

I do have more footage of the T81 doing T81 things. We shot over a thousand rounds of cheap surplus slav (can't remember what exact slav) ammo and Chinese ammo.

The T81 has, so far, not suffered any malfunctions or stoppages of any kind apart from the temperamental bolt hold-open feature. We tag-teamed topping up mags and mag-dumping until it got uncomfortably warm and the handguards started smoking.

I did get the chance to have a go at recoil comparison between a bone stock SKS and the T81. I tried to hold them about the same way, in the same stance, and same ammo. However I'm not that good, so this little anecdotal test must be taken with a grain of salt.

Keep in mind that the T81 is quite a lot lighter than the SKS when looking at this little recoil comparison webm.

>>106442Getting anything to catch fire would be quite a feat considering the neutered magazine capacity limit. My buddy and I made a good team and managed to fire as continuous as could be expected, but it simply got uncomfortably hot, not quite bursting into flames hot. Basically everything in front of the magazine was pretty much near-water-boiling super hot cup of coffee hot or hotter (exposed metal).

Looking under there, the wood isn't burned but some stray wood fibers and small shellac globules getting singed/cooking probably caused most of the smoke along with whatever bit of oil might've been hanging around under there.